The mining industry has developed various machines and systems for mining pockets of coal and minerals or seams of other such valuable and precious materials deposited in the subsurface. Such valuable subsurface seams of material are often located deep underground and cannot be economically accessed from the surface. Deep mining techniques have been developed to access such underground pockets of material. Deep mining techniques often include machinery that forms a mineshaft while extracting material from the seam. In one technique, the machinery burrows or tunnels into a wall of a mineshaft and removes nearly all the material along the seam leaving only natural or man-made pillars to support the roof of the mine.
One technique of deep or subsurface mining is longwall or conventional mining. Such mining techniques typically include remote-controlled equipment such as rotating machines that break-up and loosen desired materials from a wall to form and deepen the mineshaft. In addition, large hydraulic mobile roof-supporting equipment is used to stabilize the mineshaft and allow further mining of the desired materials. Mining machinery may span 30 feet or more and include rotating drums that move laterally along a seam to mine the desired materials. A typical drum may be for example eight feet in diameter and twenty feet wide and include dozens if not hundreds of mining tools such as bits or teeth to engage and scrape the mineshaft wall to loosen the desired materials. The loosened material typically falls down onto a conveyor belt for removal from the mineshaft. Another deep mining technique—continuous mining—also uses machines with large rotating drums equipped with mining tools to scrape or loosen the desired material from the seam.
The mining tools secured to the rotating drum in a longwall or continuous mining operation often chip, break, wear or otherwise fail after a relatively short service life. This is often due to the tools engaging with hardened pockets of rock or minerals embedded in a seam. Tools that fail relatively quickly or prematurely reduce the efficiency of mining operations and create dust instead of fragments and eventually require that the mining operation temporarily cease so that failed tools may be swapped out for new or reconditioned tools. Tools are typically swapped out manually in a time consuming and costly maintenance process.
Because of the inefficiencies of current mining apparatus and methods, there is a need in the mining industry for novel apparatus and methods for extending the service life of mining tools to increase the efficiency of mining operations.